bloggerford: making a bunch of stuff

we'll start with making faces
this past weekend Tam and I along with our good friend and neighbor Mr. David Balls hopped in the beetle and drove to asbury park to meet some friends for a day of pinball, booze and beach. At one point Tamara and Ro sat down on a bench to watch a wedding in progress on the beach, while standing around looking like a bunch of creeps the boys and i were asked by a local entrepreneur if we would like to have our portraits taken...only $15 for all of us. We declined, a few minutes later the offer was made again but this time for free because they were a new business and needed the practice. Here is some of what happened next.

If you like their work, you can check out their site here
very nice people, if you ever find yourself drunk in asbury park and in desperate need of portraits, i highly recommend them.

so aside from being a goof i have also been making a lot of stuff for the Ami6.

steering wheel

there is a plastic saddle covering the joint between the steering wheel and the central spoke. I guess after 45 years the plastic has become very brittle and started deteriorating. I decided to take a bunch of measurements and rebuild the part in solidworks before it was too far gone to copy.

then i used a 3-d printer to make a quick prototype to test fit

the fit wasn't perfect so i made a few changes and printed another prototype on a higher resolution printer.

installed

Looks awesome fits gooder but not goodest yet

only thing left to do is decide whether it's worth building a mold to cast it in black resin or just paint the prototype and roll with it.

Speakers

in the last photo you might notice a missing door panel and a hole in the vapor barrier.
there are two reasons for this. the door cards were shot, the vinyl was de-laminating and the board was completely warped along with the fact that one of the previous owners of this car had added a single speaker grille to the drivers side door... no speaker, the card was never cut but the vapor barrier and the exterior vinyl were cut?

this is an image from an article in citromania in 2002 that featured my car

you can see that even 9 years ago the door cards were deteriorating heavily.

i started by copying the profile on to new card material and cutting it out.
for the rear i tried to stay original and used proper materials. for the front i knew i needed to do something to hide the hole in the vinyl that was made for the speaker grill. Why not ad actual functioning speakers? I used styrene sheet in the front to support the extra weight of the speakers and avoid warping again.

this is what the back of the vinyl looks like when separated from the board.

i peeled away the felt backing and then used a light grit sandpaper to clean the edges where the felt was heat sealed to the vinyl.

then a new layer of felt is glued in place with spray adhesive

and the vinyl is remounted the same as the felt, i heated the vinyl with a heat gun and stretched it as i laid it down, this combined with the thick layer of felt helped to eliminate wrinkles in the vinyl from years of stretching and warping. The rear panels came out much better than the front, the front seemed to be in worse shape and it was much harder to work out all of the wrinkles.

I built some plastic speaker inserts to house a new set of 5.5" kenwood components.
hit the inserts with a little gris rose paint

hit the trim rings with some hammered steel paint

and the final product

a bad photo of one of the rear cards reinstalled

I'll document the entire interior once the rest of the stereo system is in place.

Old Business
next i tackled something that has been bugging me for a while.
in an earlier post i documented my homebrew hackjob replacement of a broken coil mount.
i finally got around to making a proper mold and casting some clean parts.